After a two-month love affair, I had to stop.  It was too much.  I couldn’t take it any more. The ups and downs, the peaks and valleys, the uncontrollable longing, and how empty I felt when deprived.  I was losing myself in the chaos of obsession.  So I did it.  I said goodbye.

I quit drinking coffee.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but coffee was not making me a better person that is for sure.  I felt more agitated and angry.  I was less patient and it was easier for me to lose my composure.  In short, I felt like it was affecting my parenting.  And even though it was like this little morning gift that made me feel high, I had to let go.

It started last Friday morning.  The depression.  The headaches.  The deep sense of loss.  I felt like my brain didn’t work as well.  I had no ideas.  And for the first time in a really long time, I felt emotionally vulnerable.  Like I was walking around with my soul naked, desperately searching for cosmic panties – any thing to cover my most private parts.

Over the weekend I descended deeper into the darkness.  I started to lose all motivation.

I couldn’t shake this feeling.  Like my heart was broken, but I didn’t know by what or by whom.  It was like I broke it myself by being careless.  I felt so sensitive – like I had peeled off my skin and all that remained was exposed nerves.  Then on my drive home from dance class on Tuesday this song came up on my Spotify.  One I hadn’t heard since I was 16.  Tori Amos’ “Silent All These Years.”  Even thought I hadn’t even thought of that song in forever… I still remembered every word, and was instantly transported back to being a teenage girl, crying in my room, and listening to chicks sing sad ass songs.

When I got home I took a shower and listened to that song over and over and over again.  Just like I would in high school.  I felt so connected to my teen self, and could remember exactly what it felt like to be her.  I thought of all that intense love I felt, but how it was never fully requited.  A teenage boy can never love a girl like she loves him.  His hand maybe – but not her.  That isn’t to say anything bad about teenage boys, I just don’t think they are as fully connected to their emotions as the girls are.  They are limited in their capacity, where a 15 year old girl will love so fully and completely with every molecule in her mitochondria.  If you want to solve the energy crisis of the world, instead of using gasoline or nuclear… harness the love and lust of teenage girls.  It is not only a renewable resource, but it has enough power to light up the world.

I felt so sad about the idea love lost.  For all those who I loved who didn’t love me back, and for all who loved me who I didn’t love.  I thought back to this conversation I once had a friend who really wanted to know if the boy she loved felt the same way.  But she couldn’t find out because she was too afraid to even let him know he was loved.  And all I could say to console the moment was that maybe loving him was enough.  Perhaps she had to love him regardless of how he felt.  That she was giving him this energetic gift that she too could receive if she could view it as just that – something that exists, but doesn’t have to be.

I sat on my bathroom floor as the song kept playing, further pushing me into the abyss.  I started staring at these ladybugs that were crawling on the ceiling.  There were about 20 of them.  My house is plagued by ladybugs.  It is borderline magical and borderline creepy.  I was watching them, and I kept thinking that my life was entirely futile.  That nothing had meaning, and all my efforts were these wasted wants of my ego.  My future felt dull and contrived.  Pointless and impossible.  I watched the ladybugs and envied their simplicity.  The joy the brought to everyone they landed on, thinking they were carrying a wish.  Life felt so over complicated and convoluted.

The only thing that made sense was that these ladybugs wanted to live with me, and that they were the only ones that understood.  And how The Munch was so overjoyed the day she realized they could fly.  How much it surprised her, and how unexpected it was.  It blew her mind open like suddenly everything seemed possible in her world.

And then I cried.  I cried and cried as Tori Amos sang “well I love the way you communicate…..” because those words stabbed me in the solar plexus.  I realized that I hadn’t cried by myself, without someone being a dick to me to ignite tears, in years and years.  The part of me that had cried because of the sorrow of existence had been silent all these years.  I remembered how I used to cry every day. Over nothing in particular, expect for the fact that the only thing that could equalize all the beauty of the world was the endless ugliness.  And how that fact tortured me, because it was so hard to accept the need for balance – the lessons in the pain.  How even though living through the pain makes you stronger, it also hardens you.  And I had to accept that my heart could never love like the heart of 16-year old Toni, because Toni the woman knew too much.  The abandon tamed by the anticipation that everything is fleeting

But by Wednesday I think the coffee had fully left my system and now I have transitioned to Yerba Matte (a “natural” caffeine). So that happened.